Employability Pipeline

Services and support within each Local Authority, Jobcentre
Plus or Health Board area.

Identification and Assessment of Needs

The identification of an individual's needs, followed by an
assessment of how severe those needs are, is critical to
understanding the barriers faced by an individual and the types of
activities required to support them towards and into employment.
While the negative is stressed - i.e. an individual's needs and
barriers - it is also important to identify and assess
an individual's strengths and competencies as this
can help give an indication of what types of occupation they may be
more attuned to.

The identification and assessment of needs can be carried out
through a number of ways including:

One-to-one interview(s) where an experienced
employability worker spends time getting to know the individual and
posing questions about different aspects of their lives that might
be barriers to entering and sustaining employment.

Diagnostic tools that pose a series of
questions or scenarios that can test for an individual's needs.
Increasingly diagnostic tools are completed online.

Group observation which involves an
experienced employability worker observing a group and identifying
an individual's needs through how they interact with others. This
can act as the starting point to a more in-depth, one-to-one
assessment.

Once the assessment is made, it is important that the assessment
results are discussed with the individual to see which they agree
on and which they are surprised by - i.e. they had not previously
identified something as a strength or weakness of theirs. This
discussion can then form the basis of a personalised action
plan.

If the assessment shows that the individual requires support
from another organisation, the individual should be signposted
and referred to the most appropriate service. This can be done by
email, phone or arranging a joint meeting with the other
organisation.

In identifying and assessing an individual's needs and
strengths, the following types of features should be reviewed: